Robert Cormier > Quotes

“It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.”
― Robert Cormier, Heroes

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”
― Robert Cormier

“The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?”
― Robert Cormier, After the First Death

“Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.”
― Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese

“He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.”
― Robert Cormier, Heroes

“A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Pluck my heart
From my flesh
And eat it.....”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“They murdered him.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.”
― Robert Cormier, 8 Plus 1

“People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“I don't mean to be insolent. I'm truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell it from here. It must offend a lot of people. That's the truth. But how many people have told you that? Instead, they either lie or try to avoid your company.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“Eric Poole began with cats. Or, to be more exact, kittens.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“A: Funny about my mother. All my life, from the time I was just a little kid, I thought of her as a sad person. I mean, the way some people are tall or fat or skinny. My father always seemed the stronger one. As if he was a bright color and she was a faded color. I know it sounds crazy.
T: Not at all.
A: But later, when I learned the truth about our lives, I found she was still sad. But strong, too. Not faded at all. It wasn't sadness so much as fear--the Never Knows.”
― Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese

“Eat my heart
Chew it hard
Swallow my soul, too”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they would do to the world when they left Trinity.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.”
― Robert Cormier, Beyond the Chocolate War

“Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away.”
― Robert Cormier, 8 Plus 1

“Go get your bus, square boy.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Often he rose early in the morning, before anyone else, and poured himself liquid through the sunrise streets, and everything seemed beautiful, everything in its proper orbit, nothing impossible, the entire world attainable.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness